I recently bought Cepstral voices for my desktop running ubuntu linux. Having used festival voices for a few months, I am extreeeeeeeeeeeeemely happy with the quality of voice. I did however run into issues where the voices were not able to handle inconsistently punctuated text. I am able to work around these by using the kind of punctuation that 'David's voice' expects and using a primitive filter for preprocessing text before giving it to swift. To give an example, 'David's voice' expects a space after period. Otherwise it speaks out the period as a dot. (If there is a preprocessor which makes text "Cepstral's David" friendly please do let me know.)

However now I have run into some issues for which I have no workaround or need to manually edit the lexicon file. I would really appreciate any help in resolving this.

1.) A lot of words/phrases like "I've, You've, C'mon, shh" are very common in the text I am getting 'David' to speak. I know I can edit the lexicon file etc. It would be really helpful if there is a precompiled lexicon file that I can reuse .

Also I would like to point out that some of these phrases(like c'mon) work out of the box with festival TTS system. Is there some way to import the lexicon from some other TTS systems(like festival) into cepstral? Any scripts/pointers/mail threads regarding this would be very very helpful. I am sincerely hoping this might be possible.

2.) Another issue that I am running into is that it speaks words like DMV, CBI very very slowly. If I increase the audio rate it starts speaking everything faster. I understand that this can be controlled using SSML tags. But I do not want to write SSML tags in my documents.

I understand that this comment is very subjective. If somehow I could control this, it would mean a significantly better auditory experience for me.

I have seen a post similar to issue#2 in the user groups(its about controlling delays after punctuation symbols. Its posted under 'Cool features'.)